USC Imagining America (2008)

About Imagining America
Imagining America is a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. Public scholarship joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence. It includes:

– Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;
– Intellectual work that produces a public good;
– Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;
– Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

Imagining America (IA) recognizes the reciprocal benefits of community-based scholarship and practice. Communities benefit from the engagement of faculty and students whose research and participation support their efforts.

Annual conferences are crucial to the work that Imagining America does. These events allow public scholars in the cultural disciplines to form a network, to share best practices, to visit project sites, and to gain inspiration and motivation for their work. The conferences take place in a workshop format.

These conferences are also the site where the network outside IA’s consortium comes to gather and work.

Judy Baca’s Keynote Address